Steven J. Zipperstein

Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. He is a contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Jewish Review of Books and co-editor of the “Jewish Lives” series for Yale University Press.

‘Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest’, claimed Roth, ‘The belief it inspires is what counts.’ Literary titan and multi-award winning writer, Philip Roth was undoubtedly a brilliant, if controversial, artist. In a career that spanned 50 years he wrote numerous, generation-changing books, from his first, Goodbye, Columbus, to his last, Nemesis. Three outstanding writers discuss his work and his legacy.

Steven Zipperstein retells the shattering story of the Kishinev riot of 1903 in late-Tsarist Russia. It dominated the headlines in the western press for weeks, intruded on Russian-American relations and inspired endeavours as widely contradictory as the Hagannah, the precursor to the Israeli army, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, and the first version of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ How did this incident come to define so much, and for so ...